During the Second World War, conservation at home was more than a virtue, it was a crucial act that every American man, woman and child was asked to make in their daily lives. Saving every last scrap of metal, paper, even grease from frying pans for the good of the troops abroad was embedded in every move you made.

A brilliant series of posters sold the American public on quickly mobilizing around actions like “Plant a Victory Garden”, “Is your trip necessary?” or, emblazoned above an image of a war-weary soldier, “Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a car club?”

The fight against manmade global warming demands a similar mobilization campaign. On July 4th, 40 busses hit the streets of Cleveland with banners designed by Michael Bierut. They are asking people to enlist as a Green Patriot by using mass transit, advocating for green jobs, and changing their daily habits–right now–to improve our chances for survival. The Cleveland posters are a pilot for a nationwide Green Patriot campaign.

This Thursday at 10:30 a.m., join a local group of Green Patriots mustering at Public Square to ride RTA buses and spread the message while building support. You can also go online, sign a petition to fight global warming and create green jobs, figure out ways to tweak your actions to be more green, and view the WWII-era posters that inspired Green Patriots.

Bicycle patrols—a community policing tactic that some law enforcement agencies de-emphasized in recent years—are seeing a resurgence as the price of gasoline approaches or surpasses $4 a gallon across the country, CNN reports. Pittsburgh is one city to hop on the bike trend.

When will Cleveland police hit city streets on bikes? It may not be as simple as Third District Commander Thomas McCartney and Fifth District Commander Calvin D. Williams first thought. When a small group of patrolmen under McCartney’s command discovered a dozen bikes collecting dust in a storage locker, they rescued and cobbled together a half-a-dozen rideable bicycles by combining parts.

It seems like a happy ending, except the six officers aren’t so much patrolling on bikes as they are “skulking around” on them, says Lois Moss, founder of Walk + Roll Cleveland, who is advocating to make Cleveland Police on bikes a legit operation.

"From what I understand, some members of the police union do not want officers riding bicycles because they want it to be a separate Unit whereby it gets special funding,” Moss explains. “They also are saying that officers should get paid more to ride a bicycle as opposed to use a car or a motorcycle or a horse.”

That way of thinking is behind the times, Moss says. She cites the "Bike Bill" being considered by the U.S. Senate. It lists a number of statistics regarding bicycles, including this one: Many public agencies in cities are using bicycles to deliver critical municipal services…96 percent of those serving more than 250,000 residents now have routine patrols by bicycle.

"They are not seeing the up-side, which is officers are healthier," she adds. "One cop told me he lost 40 pounds due to cycling – plus the relationship between the police and citizens is more open.”

Peter McDermott figures, heightened interest where our food comes from is a sign that a central “spot” to connect and share ideas on how to grow a sustainable, local food system is needed. Like the subject of his interest (foodies, urban gardeners, locavores, etc.), he decided against waiting, and just rolled up his sleeves.

McDermott is a Network Weaver at
Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (E4S), and recently launched localfoodcleveland.org, a social network that’s free to join, but on the look-out for valuable ideas.

He used a free program called Ning to build the local food site. The main feature is a forum where any registered user can post a topic, such as McDermott’s on Farmers of the future - immigrants, hipsters, retirees, and the green-collar workforce?

The West Creek winds eight miles through heavily developed areas of Parma, Seven Hills, Independence and Brooklyn Heights before unceremoniously joining with the Cuyahoga River through a pipe under a building. It’s a reminder of how many creeks and rivers, not so long ago, were buried below concrete. Today, a few daring visionaries believe Northeast Ohio is hungry for something new— a connection to more parks and nature close to home.

“We know that we can never completely restore West Creek to the way it was back in the 1800s. But we can make it so that people want the stream to be a part of their lives,” Neal Hess, watershed coordinator for the West Creek Preservation Committee, explains in the documentary film, “The Return of the Cuyahoga.”

Hess, David Vasarhelyi and Dave Lincheck were the dreamweavers of restoring West Creek and, with a small army of volunteers, spent years knocking on doors, organizing support, and finally building an organization to create a West Creek Reservation.

Cleveland Metroparks assumed management of the 400 contiguous acres of greenspace in the West Creek Reservation on January 1, 2006. The Park District's goal is to effectively protect, restore and enhance the ecological integrity of the West Creek Valley. (Read more).

What will make Cleveland more of a Bicycle Friendly Community? The city may have earned an honorable mention as a ‘BFC’ from the League of American Bicyclists this past May (during Cleveland Bike Week), but the national group says the city still has a long way to go. The League recently supplied the city with a four-page list of priority improvements that would move it up the ranks to BFC-Bronze or higher.

“Set an ambitious, attainable target to increase the percentage of trips made by bike in the community,” the League urges. Currently, less than ½ of 1 percent of trips to work are done by bike in Cleveland. “This number should be increased significantly in order to demonstrate bicycle friendliness.”

Beyond recognition, Cleveland is interested in adopting the ‘bike friendliness’ list as its agenda for making cycling a real transportation option, says Martin Cader at Cleveland City Planning.

Miles of new bike lanes are one measures of bike friendliness, but just as important is how safe people feel cycling on city streets. Cleveland (and Cuyahoga County) can boost safety by traditional means—re-educating adults how to ride a bike safely on the street and offering special BikeEd training during driver’s education courses and to bus and truck drivers. Cleveland can also adopt innovative programs like Chicago’s Bike Buddies. There, 240 ambassadors make house calls—bike commuting along with people from their home and teaching basic bike maintenance.

Agenda items are categorized under the ‘Five E’s’—Engineering, Education, Encouragement and Enforcement. (Read more).

What might green collar jobs look like in Cleveland? To get some idea, see the dozens of Cleveland kids combining work and hands-on environmental learning this summer.

For the second straight year, teams of young adults participating in Cleveland’s Summer Youth Program are building rain barrels, digging and planting rain gardens, collecting water samples and cleaning beaches at Lake Erie, painting ‘Dump no waste’ stencils at storm drains, reading water meters, and using GIS to track light poles for Cleveland Public Power.

Cleveland, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI) are the program sponsors.

We visited with the teams building rain barrels and laying the groundwork for a rain garden.

Cleveland’s Kareema Jackson and Robben Abkins (pictured) were busy converting 55-gallon drums into rain barrels— tapping out and caulking plugs for diverter hoses and twisting-on spigots—in a city-owned warehouse on the southwest side. They will build and install 280 rain barrels at residences in NPI’s six 'model block' neighborhoods. After their crew meets a 40-barrel-a-day quota, the barrels are loaded onto trucks and another team will ride out to homes where supervisors help them place two cinder blocks for a base and hook them up to a backyard downspout.

The one-mile Segment One of the Towpath Trail—from Old Harvard Road to Steelyard Commons—stepped closer to reality as organizers presented their preferred alignment on Tuesday at the Zoo. The public has 30 days to weigh in before the Towpath Trail Partnership Committee finalizes the alignment and moves ahead with detailed designs.

Read more here.

More than a year after preservationists, designers, architects and environmental advocates banded together and presented a case to adaptively reuse the Breuer Tower, K&D Group, the developers who bought the tower and the Ameritrust site from the county, have inked a deal for a boutique hotel to occupy 14 floors of the tower.

This move promises to elevate Cleveland to the center of an important national debate about Modern architecture. This month, Metropolis features the fight over renovating JPMorgan Chase headquarters, a modernist classic in New York. They write:

The dispute between environmentalists and preservationists is whether these twentieth-century artifacts should be seen as building blocks of embedded energy, salvaged only to the extent practical, or if the integrity of the design is worth consideration.

K&D and its architects at Westlake Reed Leskosky (which worked with Breuer on his tower design) are poised to show the world how a city in the midst of rebuilding its image places value on design and existing resources.

MSN.com features Cleveland in today’s post “Smart(ish) Cities: 12 unexpected urban areas that are doing good green stuff.”

It’s a nice recap of the Grist feature on Cleveland. It includes some things we already knew (“this Midwest metropolis is also home to a surprisingly forward-looking sustainability subculture”) and a few things we were pleasantly surprised to hear (“Cleveland also ranks second only to Los Angeles in the number of projects per capita seeking certification under LEED-ND”).

Crain’s Cleveland Business has a special section this week on green building activity in Cleveland, featuring some high-profile projects pursuing LEED-certification. Some of the highlights include Flats East Bank pursuing green roofs, Forest City’s LEED-registered renovation of the Higbee Building, and major developments including the Ameritrust site and Pesht in the Warehouse District verbally committing to LEED.

The green building movement is being driven by tenants: Case in point, Ernst & Young global chairman and chief executive Jim Turley said meeting green requirements was part of the evaluation that led to them signing on to Flats East Bank.

Cleveland’s top developers committing to LEED is a good start. What we need now is to set a more aggressive goal – such as all green buildings will achieve at least LEED-Silver – in order for Cleveland to compete with Chicago, Pittsburgh, and even Grand Rapids.